By Mark Gibson
Seven days before Christmas, the Defense Appropriations committees of the United States Congress issued an unprecedented funding package: $500 million to the U.S. Postal Service to purchase mail-sorting technologies that protect against anthrax attacks. Even the committee members noted that this few-strings-attached-appropriation is unusual and acknowledged "the extraordinary circumstances surrounding biohazardous material in the mail... In providing these emergency funds, the conferees do not intend to set a precedent for operational subsidies."
What does this have to do with the municipal water/wastewater industry? Quite a bit, you may be surprised to learn.
The September 11 terrorist attacks spurred Congress to consider a variety of policies to help cope with domestic security threats that now are an everyday reality we must all deal with. Over the coming months, in this election year, Congress will be doing all that it can to show it is doing the people's work in safeguarding all manner of potential terrorist targets. As the U.S. Postal Service appropriation demonstrated, extraordinary fiscal resources will be funneled toward these efforts. And it is clear these types of threats must be addressed quickly and thoroughly in order to assure the highest levels of security for all of our citizens.
Americans have always taken pride in being an open society. The cost of this freedom, however, leaves us vulnerable to terrorist attacks. We already know that terrorists like the al Qaeda have targeted our water and wastewater delivery infrastructure around the country. Public pronouncements that "our Nation's water supplies are safe from terrorists" might be designed to allay the fears of the public, but are not addressing the problem head-on. Reading the Wall Street Journal will disabuse anyone of such misconceptions.
The Journal, on December 27, wrote "Across the country, water-utility officials are taking steps to prevent terrorists from reversing the flow of water into a home or business - which can be accomplished with a vacuum cleaner or bicycle pump - and using the resulting "backflow" to push poisons into a local water-distribution system."
It's a frightening thought that the system might be that vulnerable, but many professionals in this business have known this for years and are now beginning to take the steps needed.
America must protect itself at home and abroad. And our industry now has a responsibility to inform and counsel Congress about the vulnerabilities of our water and wastewater systems, and we need to do so quickly.
Arguably, our industry may have already lost a chance to help our cities and towns secure the funds for replacing decrepit and decaying water infrastructures. The $17 billion Federal budget surplus predicted in 1997 for this year has evaporated with the recession. Trillion-dollar investments to upgrade our water infrastructure now seem unlikely. Instead, we must immediately ask Congress to support specific initiatives that help address our vulnerability to terrorism.
The vulnerability assessments being undertaken throughout the country can help us identify key shortcomings across all stages of the water and wastewater system, not just vulnerabilities inside the treatment plant fence. But we owe it to the American people to act now, and not wait for all these assessments to be complete before making a case to Congress.
In the interest of stimulating discussion and consensus, we suggest the following priority initiatives to pursue before Congress:
- Appropriate Federal fiscal support to help public and private water utilities purchase high-priority security systems, particularly those solutions that address vulnerabilities in the drinking water distribution network through detection, monitoring and protection. Variations on continuous real-time distribution monitoring platforms like those deployed by the Denver Water Board three years ago ought to be installed anywhere there is a substantial terrorist threat. (Denver originally made this move to enhance process management of its entire system; now they're that much safer. Clearly, not all water and wastewater providers are exposed to the same risk. Key political targets, major cities and tourism hubs are the obvious priorities.)
- Federal R&D ventures that will help develop a family of silver bullet contaminant detection technologies for drinking water and wastewater applications. There currently exists no working technology that can detect the presence of all known biohazardous materials or threat agents. No commercial product currently exists that can provide rapid and routine direct detection of pathogens at the low levels expected, nor at reasonable cost.
- Federal research support to help determine the cause-and-effect relationships between the presence of threat agents and changes in drinking water chemistry and hydrology. Such knowledge can help utilities establish "trigger levels" to detect contaminants with off-the-shelf water monitoring technologies [today], and help utilities interpret baseline monitoring data from their distribution networks.
Again, to make the progress we need requires that our industry take action immediately. Study groups and advisory committees are important and necessary; yet coalitions that advocate specific sound policy initiatives are more effectual.
Congress is expected to proceed at an unprecedented pace to address the terrorism threat to America. We must move at the same pace, or the policy counsel that we are all uniquely qualified to offer will go unheard. And we will continue to remain vulnerable to the very terrorist activities that we know must be avoided.
About the Author:
Mark Gibson is a member of the Board of Directors of the Water and Wastewater Equipment Manufacturers Association and heads regulatory affairs for the Hach Company, based in Loveland, CO. With 20 years experience in molding environmental policy at the state and federal levels, Gibson has an M.S. in energy/mining economics from Colorado School of Mines, and an undergraduate degree in engineering from the University of Maryland.
